MULTIPLE BIOME TERRAIN

[ignacioc91 101]

Hi!!! Is it possible to have a terrain with multiple biomes? For instance, a Mediterranean Sea terrain, with GermanyCE tiles in southern Europe, and Desert tiles in northern Africa. Is there any tool in the Terrain Editor that allows me to do that, without having to place tile by tile by hand?? Thanks!!!!

 

 

Regards,

Ignacioc91

[Wrench 9,850]

yes, it's called the 'texturelist.ini', and unfortunately you have to import all the tiles by hand, and place them by hand (excepting those areas were you can use the "flood" bucket.

[+Gepard 11,316]

Theoretically you can do such a terrain. You must merge both tilesets into one tileset.

But:

But practically i dont see a way to avoid a lot of handtiling of the terrain.

[ignacioc91 101]

Thanks for the info guys!!!!

[Wrench 9,850]

and s**tloads of new transitions ... you'll need at least 3 dozen

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

Yes, I think you can do all biomes, in auto-tile, with no hand holding any tiles. Its something I worked out over the summer. ignacio, do you work in TE much?

 

There are two ways of manual tiling with bucket fill. One is in TE, and its very quirky, and does NOT allow random placement of tiles of the same tile type: just one tile can be selected to bucket fill in TE at one time. so all tiles in that bucket filled area will look the same.

 

The other -- much easier -- way of manual tiling is painting on a bmp. Export your basic tile map as bmp, and then modify that bmp and then import it again for tile map. Same problem as above: you can only bucket fill the bmp with one selected tile at a time. There is no random fill of tiles for terrain variety. Now, I may be wrong about that, but its what I found in a (very short) single test.

 

You can place tiles yourself, one by one, one tile at a time, choosing different tiles as you go along. Say, place a hundred of one tile, then place another hundred, then another hundred, all mixed up in location, to give a "random" variety. It depends on how much you have to tile. For my big map, there's NO WAY I'm gonna try placing tiles one by one, except in very limited areas, maybe.

 

So on my big map (finally), I want EVERYTHING to auto tile. Nothing is placed by hand, except in the future -- maybe -- a few special tiles here or there. If you czech out the Merry Christmas thread on PAGE 3, you see I try to get all the basic biomes from North Pole to India to auto tile. Maybe a hundred lakes and (potentially) large rivers too. I do this by using two methods.

 

(1) One way is having fake "cities" to define terrain, the "cities" being hundreds of kilometers in size, and sometimes having negative sizes in one coordinate. Use Max and Min city distances for Texturelist.ini. The problem here is, cities can't be auto tiled by citylist.ini. But, you can think of city tiles as a normal terrain and do this...

 

(2) The other way is to use an artificial or "fake" height map to import into TE as height map, where, say, some biome or terrain type is given an unused high altitude that no other terrain type will be at. You draw, on the import height bmp, the terrain with the colour matching a selected altitude. Its like an advanced inclusion region -- I assume you are familiar with TE....yes? These unused altitudes should be above the highest point on your map, although I figured out a way to get around that! However, all this forces you to make a "real" height map (HFD) that you swap in to work with the tile map (TFD) made with the fake height map. That means, you run TE two times. One TE run is not enough.

 

One example:: If you look at this, you see the orange areas in the south. Those are sand dunes, inside larger desert areas (yellow). The desert was auto tiled using fake cities, the sand dunes auto tiled after being drawn on an imported fake height bmp.

 

click ~> http://s35.photobucket.com/albums/d178/Lexx_Luthor/144/?action=view&current=ST.jpg

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

igna, I got your PM about your terrain, but don't know how to Reply (new PM forum software maybe).

 

I got the SHOTS with INCLEMENT+created missions, and it looks like flat overcast replaces the terrain. I'm not sure what's going on. I've never seen that.

 

 

Ask on the forums, since...

 

(1) Others will know *much* better than I, and...

 

(2) Others wanting to learn terrain creation will find the discussion in the threads. That's how I learned SF modding by reading much older CA and SimQH threads.

 

We must leave some archeaolgical remains for future players of SF-1 to excavate.

[ignacioc91 101]

Hi!!!! Thanks for your reply and your help. What I did, is reinstalate WoE and changed the terrain tiles. Now it works, I don't know what in earth has happened!

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

Great.

 

Now if I can give you the best help you'll ever get, ever....

 

Now that you have a working game, COPY PASTE the game to another folder for a "semi backup."

 

That way, you never need to "install" the game again. Many times I killed my SF, but I just copy my backup game and I'm flying (well, modding) again. I've only installed from the boxed CD one time, back in 2005 when I got my SF-1. That ability alone makes Thudwire rank among the top game developers out there.

 

Its a semi backup because it protects you against the game getting porked. It won't protect you from hard drive failure. For that you need to copy-paste the game to another spare hard drive (or three) that you otherwise keep unplugged from computer. Power supply failure can kill hard drives. If in a pinch, you could use DVDs or thumbdrives, as they are cheap, but that's exactly why I don't trust them as much as stored away backup hard drives.

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

oops, AGAIN I have to remember to poast that I run my SF game in its own folder, NOT the stock folder buried deep inside C: wherever games are "supposed" to go. In fact I dedicate a hard drive partition (D:) to SF. Keeps things neat. This also is one of the neat things about TK's games, at least the older game.

 

D:\SF

 

I have a few supporting folders where I keep SF stuff, like cockpits. I reference all aircraft cockpits to D:\A where many planes can share one cockpit. Its weird but its insanely efficient with little clutter.